Music: Met’s New Coloratura

The Metropolitan Opera has a dazzling new coloratura soprano. She is Atlanta-born Mattiwilda Dobbs, 31, pert, appealing to the eye, solacing to the most opera-worn ear. She made her debut as Gilda in Rigoletto last week, and the event was doubly important, for she is the first Negro to sing a romantic lead at the Met.*

Rigoletto, despite some of the most grippingly grisly melodrama in grand opera, is distinctly dated. Whenever Gilda has a spare moment, the orchestra lapses into a kind of soft-shoe accompaniment, leaving wide-open spaces for her graceful vocal glides and glitters. Soprano Dobbs sounded smooth as cashmere beside the tweedy textures of Tenor Jan Peerce and Baritone Leonard Warren. Her phrasing was always neat and true; in lyrical passages her voice floated with never an edge. In Verdi’s showy old coloratura bits, e.g., Caro Nome, it glittered clear and bright as a glockenspiel in a football band. She was nervous at first—her vibrato was fast as a canary’s, and she heaved her pretty bosom with each breath, which is not regarded good form—but she stopped the show several times, and the bravos rang out like pistol shots when she finished.

Soprano Dobbs has traveled as far and fast as her admirers could have hoped, since she bowed at La Scala as Elvira in Rossini’s L’ltaliana in Algeri three years ago (TIME, March 16, 1953). In Europe she has appeared before both opera and concert audiences from Stockholm to Mi lan. While studying in Paris she met her husband, a Spanish journalist named Luis Rodriguez, lost him 14 months later (he died of a liver ailment), two days before she was to sing a command performance of Le Cog d’Or at London’s Covent Garden. She went on (as the Queen of Shema-khan) despite the tragedy, now thinks “singing helped.”

Mattiwilda (a contraction of the names of her maternal grandmother) made her U.S. stage debut with the San Francisco Opera a year ago, was back in Covent Garden last February when word came that the Met wanted her to sing four Gildas this season. She was asked to keep it a secret until the opera made the announcement, so her only celebration was to sing “especially well that night.”

*Famed Contralto Marian Anderson broke the singers’ color barrier two years ago in the role of the Negro Ulrica in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. Three weeks later, Baritone Robert McFerrin made his Met debut as Amonasro in Aïda. Ballerina Janet Collins was the first Negro ever to be featured at the Met (in 1951), also in Aïda.